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I never had a rum ball until I met Merrill. And Merrill knows a good rum ball when she tastes one; she has taught me the finer points of rum ball-dom. A proper rum ball must be dense but moist, and ideally a little gooey. It must sing with booze but shouldn't be too sweet. It should look unpromising and deliver a bang.

It turns out that our friend Melissa Clark has just the recipe for such proper rum balls in her terrific new book In the Kitchen with A Good Appetite. I tasted them at a recent joint book signing I did with Renato Poliafito and Matt Lewis (Baked Explorations), Melissa Vaughan and Michael Harlan Turkell (The New Brooklyn Cookbook), and Melissa. Barely a soul showed up, so we sat at the long signing table as if we were on a banquette at Balthazar, and dug into samples of the rum balls (a successful signing in my view).

What makes Melissa's rum balls peerless is that she uses Nabisco chocolate wafers, and a little honey to sweeten the "dough."

1. In the bowl of a food processor, pulse together the cookie crumbs and pecans until the nuts are finely ground.

2. In a separate bowl, stir together the bourbon or rum, 1 cup confectioners' sugar, the cocoa powder, and honey. Add the mixture to the food processor and pulse until just combined. Let the dough rest, uncovered, at room temperature for 4 hours or, lightly covered, overnight. This will dry it out a little.

3. Use your fingers to roll the dough into balls about 1 inch in diameter. Roll the balls in confectioners' sugar. Store the balls airtight if you like them moist, or uncovered if you like them to develop a crunchy sugar crust on the outside. Sprinkle with (or roll the balls in) additional confectioners' sugar just before serving.

Comments (21)

I made these to bring as a hostess gift, and they were a hit! Also had to leave some at home for my husband...One ingredient I could not track down was the Nabisco chocolate wafers. I don't know if it's a post-blizzard shortage or whatever...But they were not to be found in my corner of NYC. I have to confess that until I wanted to make this, I hadn't ever looked for these cookies, homemade being the standard in these parts! But I substituted Stella D'Oro chocolate biscotti and they were just great! The only adjustment I had to make was to cut the drying time. Biscotti don't have as much fat as the cookie recommended, so you don't want to dry them so long they get crumbly. Not that you'd have any trouble getting rid of the crumbs! I'm loooking forward to trying it again with the Trader Joe's cookies.

These are terrific. I made a batch using, of all things, Trader Joe's Chocolate Cat Cookies, and they turned out perfectly. I also toasted the pecan pieces before processing. It made the crumb mixture small fabulous, but the bourbon is so strong, toasting may not have mattered, ultimately. I gave "bread and chocolate" as my edible holiday treat for friends and neighbors, making rosemary epi roll wreaths, and putting a bag of these bourbon balls in the middle of each . . . with a jar of a tart plum jam I made last summer as well, on the side. I rolled the bourbon balls in ground chocolate instead of confectioners' sugar, which worked very well. Great, great recipe! ;o)

I've been making Ky bourbon balls since 1983 -- made 330 of them this year plus espresso truffles and my new favorite, pecan pie truffles (adapted from a NYT recipe that was posted right before Thanksgiving). The key to real candy balls is dipping them in high quality chocolate. It's extra work but the presentation is worth it.

This looks like a good recipe...but, I grew up on a Kentucky farm...so, my mother's recipe for Bourbon balls was quite different and will always be *the* authentic Bourbon ball candy for me.

It started with harvesting black walnuts in the fall and laying them out in the driveway to run over every time we drove in and out to remove that tough green, finger-staining outer husk. Then came the hard work of cracking those tough nuts to extract the precious nutmeat. Anyone who's ever done that knows how tedious this is!

When it came time to make the Christmas Bourbon balls, Mom would soak the back walnuts in Bourbon for at least 24 hours. She'd then make a simple "fondant" of mostly confectioner's sugar and butter to which she'd add the drained nuts. Mix, roll into small balls, chill. They'd then be dipped in bittersweet chocolate.

Talk about bonbons with a punch! Everyone in our extended family looked forward to those Bourbon balls!

Wow -- and yum! I grew up making black walnut cookies (sadly NOT soaked in bourbon). We always had a basketful of black walnuts in the garage but we never thought to run over them with our car (and my dad was in the car business -- what a handy selling point that could have been.. ). Instead, we cracked them using a vise. My mother would chop them finely and add them to a cookie that's much like a Swedish nut cookie.

Ohhhh! What a blast from the past! I spent two very happy years in Kentucky, in the Lexington area, and every Christmas I pine for those black walnuts...In anything! And Maker's Mark bourbon, which you can now finally get here in NYC. Thanks for the memories!

My grandmother used to make rum balls every year. One year she didn't have the necessary rum, but had an old bottle of wild turkey. We had turkey balls that year...it still makes me chuckle like I'm 12.

Yessss! Have you been reading foodpickle lately? I was whining about a rather "ordinary" bourbon ball recipe I tried recently and how I'm now searching for another one. This is it!! And, given that I'm still in the office putting the finishing touches on documents for deals that should close today (and have kept me in the office and out of the kitchen for the past two months), I actually will be doing some holiday cooking, baking, etc in the next few days. Thank you, thank you, thank you!!! ;o)

I've made these twice this holiday season so far! I love her book. I got a very deep amazing cocoa flavor, when I used Newman's Own Chocolate Alphabet Cookies, rather than the wafers. They are fantastic!